always wanted a brother
When a friend of mine commented on the high schoolers busted by way of the facebook, I started monitoring my social media intake. I figure it’s the least I can do to avoid being suspended for drinking an unknown substance out of plastic cups. Granted, the fear is diminished by my not being in high school or underage. Slightly.
The fact that the photos in question were handed to the administration on a disc anonymously is so… subversive. (Anonymous, you backstabbing cloud of skin-crease-stink, you should be flogged; call the guy a dick, don’t turn him into the higher-ups, you pussy; kids these days, I tell ya.) If I weren’t cold almost to the point of shivering, my skin would be crawling.
Conclusions:
1. Facebook is evil, but like taxes are evil.
2. Myspace is a complete waste outside of easily accessed band profiles.
3. We embrace a surveillance society while opposing it.
Facebook caught some blowback when it tried to publish recent site activity from external sites without telling anyone. Their policy is apparently based on a flawed “opt-out” philosophy. (We’ll be adding stuff that compromises your security, but you can, like, totally restrict that if you have an extra half-hour to dig through our settings; no worries, dude.) That, combined with conversations like this one prove how ridiculous Facebook can get.
I made some adjustments to compensate. I’ve restricted almost everything I can restrict (I’m being generous by allowing myself to appear in searches of the M.S.P. network; even if they can’t then see my profile). If you’re not already one of my friends, try to search for me. (If you can find me, send a message and I’ll give you a prize.*) I’m also seriously thinking about removing my tags from photos.
I can’t bring myself to delete it. (Of course, I couldn’t even if I wanted to.) Scrabulous is too fantastic a time-wasting distraction to sacrifice. It’s also the easiest way to contact people when you’re as lazy as I. There are a few other reasons to keep the thing around. Now that they’ve created a way to ignore all those shitty applications, it’s only the removal of a few targeted ads away from being a solid platform.
Myspace, on the other hand, has gone a different direction. If you aren’t looking for bands and their corresponding information, you’re swimming through a puddle of triceratops’ diarrhea. The interface is terrible and the gains are profoundly negative. During the time I was paying attention, I received one message, so I don’t feel bad about deleting duplicated friends between it and facebook. It’s now a tour date resource. (oddly, I still get hits on another blog from a myspace profile, but it’s not linked on mine. I find myself confused about who’s promoting that blog on theirs.) That profile has been private since almost day one.
The real issue isn’t which networking site I’m on or how many photos are up or who can access my information. Facebook and the ilk are redefining privacy. We (not just the threes of you, but America en masse) have started to trade privacy for exclusion. It’s no longer about whether or not information is personal, it’s about who’s accessing it.
The outcry after Facebook started broadcasting everything you did over a shared feed was impressive. No one wanted all their friends to know who’s friend requests they were denying or that their relationship ended. Why they thought to put this information on the interweb in the first place never came up. There was only a muffled, exasperated sigh when Facebook started announcing which movies you put on your blockbuster queue.
Everyone can scream until their face is red about how invasive, superficial, and unsettling the social networking sites are. Most of these people are forgetting the point. Facebook, Myspace, social networking sites, photo sharing accounts, any other form of media sharing over the interweb, and the interweb itself is voluntary. Those that complain how these sites facilitate prying are the ones putting up drunk photos of their friends or leaving their profiles public. Parents complain about sexual predators jerking off in dark corners of the internets while letting their children carelessly prance from page to page.
As the definition of privacy erodes, so does our access to it. We freely tweet about every mundane non-thing we do through the day, thinking that someone gives a shit. The government, office superiors, or high school principals are starting to do just that. They’re monitoring in the name of safety, regulation, and our children’s futures. We politely refer to it as spying (and impolitely refer to it as authoritarianism), but can we blame them? Are they doing anything that the surly friend of your friend’s girlfriend’s brother isn’t already?
Maybe, when you’re on the street talking loudly on your cell about the latest venereal disease you’ve finally recovered from, you should think twice before bitching out the passerby that turned to his buddy and muttered, “that’s disgusting.” (fun game: replace “passerby” with “low-level A.T.&T. drone behind a desk within room 641a.”)
* there is no prize.